Tag Archives: Weight gain

Why do I even bother? Nobody wants me to succeed at this so why try? It all comes down to our society, and the fact we are all bitter cunts.

True success is never really rewarded in the way it deserves to be. Like in design technology at school, when you’d build a 14ft tall sculpture of Lion-O from Thundercats out of four bits of duplo, a plank of wood and a pritt stick but get a lower grade than the kid who made a plastic calendar. Granted the task was probably to make a plastic calendar, but where are the extra points for invention?

Not fucking Lion-O

Charlie Sheen is vilified for getting blasted on drugs and booze every night, partying in possibly the coolest city in the world and having not one but two girlfriends. One is his maid and one is a porn star. You know the old saying “most men want a whore in the bedroom a chef in the kitchen and a cleaner in the house”? Charlie Sheen fucking has that! And he spends the parts of his day when he isn’t drinking something, shagging something or smoking something rubbing his amazingness in millions of people’s faces on talk shows. Compared to that, a wife who looks more like a melted waxwork of the Queen Mother every day, kids who learnt to talk from watching “Rasta Mouse” and a job that is only just subsidising your crawl to the grave sounds a lot like a plastic calendar.

Better than you

To be honest a lot of things about everyday life seem like a plastic calendar to us now. Go in a calendar shop for example. But this is the year 2011, surely the older amongst you will remember the bold propositions for life in the year 2000. We’ll all be living on the moon! Which is ridiculous for a start because the moon is smaller than Earth so if our whole population moved there we’d be cracking each other’s skulls open and eating the goo inside the minute we ran out of cheese. We’ll all be flying around on skateboards! Now most people who are both over 16 and who don’t suffer from drug dependency don’t skateboard anyway. If you’re scared of falling off and hitting your head on the pavement on a normal skateboard why would you suddenly get one when science makes it possible to ride them into the surface of the sun?

In reality our future is set in stone. I’ve seen it. Stop listening if you don’t want it spoiled. Basically in 2050 it’s exactly the same except we have to download our meals off itunes, Colonel Gadaffi is married to Cheryl Cole, the most-watched reality show is China’s Got Nuclear Weapons and after decades of hard work scientists finally found a reason for James Corden to exist. Luckily they’ve seen his shows so don’t tell anyone and he’s exterminated in the “Great Celebrity Cull” of 2051.

Somebody put this cunt out of my misery please

What does any of this have to do with weightloss? Nothing motherfucker, but you enjoyed it anyway right?

Damn you Rocky Balboa. Damn you to hell. This is no misguided vendetta against the popular Rocky movie series, which for all its ups and downs remains one of my all-time favourites. This is for the film’s famous Bill Conti-penned theme tune, and the ridiculous ideas it has put into my head.

You see the lethal combination of Stallone’s mono-syllabic screen pugilist and the iconic series theme has led me down a painful road, both literally and figuratively. Allow me to elaborate. If you’d have been driving through a particular rural Bedfordshire village at around 2pm today you’d have seen what from a distance looked like an alarmingly red-faced bear. It was in fact myself, in shorts covering just enough of my lower extremities to avoid classification as underwear. I personally would identify my activity at the time as running, depending on your kindness-levels you may choose to term it “brisk walking” (very kind), “shuffling” (less kind), or “staggering” (ooh, sick burn!). You see I have embarked on a New Year’s fitness regime, and this blog is here to tell you about it.

So what is so special about some fat computer nerd losing weight then moaning about it? Because, my fellow computer nerd (and you’ll have to have been to find this, WordPress isn’t exactly Google is it?) I’m a real person. Not a real person like on cynical advertising campaigns or reality shows, the men who only have a four pack instead of a six pack or the girls who have to make do with being a size 2. I’m too real. I don’t want this to turn into a self-hating rant, the sort of thing people only read after you’ve either committed a crime or gone on X Factor (look for me at the 2011 auditions!). In truth I’m average, or at the very least I have a series of attributes, some good and some bad, that add up to average. Below-average fitness. Decent personality. Disappointing hair. Varied music tastes. Constantly hungry. Extremely ambitious. Oversized waist. Obscure general knowledge (scraping the barrel, but I have won the odd quid on a quiz machine). What I’m getting at is this isn’t a pity party, this is a genuine attempt to put a normal 21st century male’s perspective on weight loss out into the world.

You see some of us can’t do the celebrity diets. I mean for a start, smack is really expensive and certainly not the healthiest way to get stick thin. And workout DVDs are simply bizarre, I mean who legitimately dances in front of their TV screaming “pump it!” while wearing a spandex one-piece that would make Mr Motivator blush? The only people I’ve met who’ve bought workout DVDs only did so because Kelly Brook hasn’t done porn yet, and while I’m sure they sweated I doubt it was in the interest of getting in shape. Pump it indeed.

He's pumped it, have you?

Now that you’ve all suffered through a literary tangent that took in tiny shorts, celebrity smack addictions and masturbation, I will return to my original point. Why I am so annoyed at Rocky Balboa? The “Italian Stallion” has provided me with some of my favourite cinematic moments. When he did the impossible and went the distance with Apollo in the Oscar-winning debut, vanquished Hulk Hogan and Mr T in III, solved communism in IV and taught us all not to fuck with pensioners in Balboa he did so to the sound of me yelping in vicarious delight. But he has also led me to a future of joint pain, starvation and disillusionment. This is because of the cinematic technique that Rocky popularised, the musical training montage.

The musical training montage is simple. Take someone who is good at something, but doesn’t believe in them self. It could be because the task ahead is simply too hard, because their trainer died after Mr T screamed at them, or their scantily-clad African-American friend got battered by a Russian. Then have them work out. Lift weights, run, chop wood, chase chickens, hug said African-American chum all to the sound of an incredibly inspiring 3 minute song. Then, possibly with the aid of a new-found beard, have them take on the fucking world and win. This makes for great cinema…and a really rubbish workout plan.

You see no matter the task, Rocky Balboa can go from gibbering wreck to clobbering wrecking ball in three minutes, accompanied by nothing but that damn music. So I loaded up the track, titled “Gonna Fly Now”, on my iPod and I hit the road. I staggered up that hill like a seal that had been punched in the spine. Nothing. No sudden sense of purpose, no desire to take on the heavyweight champion of the world (it is still Apollo Creed isn’t it?), no desire to kick the snot out of Hulk Hogan. It can’t all happen at once I thought, so I threw on “Gonna Fly Now” again and pumped some iron. I even tried to put myself in Rocky’s shoes, picturing myself winning a boxing match and screaming ”Yo Adrian!” like a brain-damaged air-raid siren. Nothing. My arms still look like those cuts of chicken the butcher puts right at the front of the counter because they look like deflated balloons and nobody wants to buy them. One last try I thought, without the aid of an African-American guy to hug maybe even Sylvester Stallone would have needed one more montage before bludgeoning B.A Baracus. So I took to my sit-ups like a duck to concrete, and had a horrible realisation. My hunched posture, craving for Dairy Milk and stalling-car wheeze weren’t going to disappear over the course of one song, no matter how punch-a-rhino-in-the-face inspiring it was.

Give us a cuddle mate. Go on.

It is a disappointing revelation, even for a 21 year-old Journalism graduate (you didn’t think I taught myself to talk this much bollocks, did you?) who should really know better. Life isn’t a film. Mine though, is now a blog. The thrilling part about a blog is that nobody, not even the writer, knows how it is going to end. I could get washboard abs and a best-selling book out of this. I could get ligament damage and four page views. One thing is for sure, that this exercise lark is going to take more thought. Maybe if I try Eye Of The Tiger?